I started up in distress; but Janet, putting the kitten gently back on the table, burst into laughter.  I am very sure I had never heard Janet laugh before, and I don’t think Paul ever had.  A prettier, happier, more silvery little peal could not be imagined; but it was not so much that which struck home to my heart as the fact that if I had shut my eyes I could have thought my Janet stood in the room.  The girl had her mother’s laugh.

I returned hastily to my work, and did not dare to lift my head until Janet was gone—­then I looked stealthily at Paul.

The sun was just setting—­the sky a rolling roseate glory from end to end.  Paul—­my Paul—­my Paul, with the old beautiful light in his face, stood, with arms crossed, looking up into it.  All at once something came into my throat which almost stifled me, so that I could not have sat where I was for any consideration whatever.  I slipped quietly away and left him.

From this day I loved the girl.  Whether it was her carelessness about the dress—­so like her mother—­or the laugh—­or what—­I loved her now almost as much as I had loved her mother.

It seemed to me that from this day, too, Paul became more like his old self:  a very much toned-down and softened old self; no longer so much the hard, cynical Paul of later years as the boyish Paul of old.  Of course, no sooner had my feelings changed in this way than I became greatly interested in Janet’s lovers.  I thought the cotton millionaire vulgar; and the American railway king I could not make this or that of; but the lord seemed a very nice, simple-mannered young man; so that I hoped—­for although I am a bit of a Radical, I lay claim to having some common-sense too—­if it were to be one of these three, it would be he.

But the calm indifference with which this slip of a girl treated three such lovers was truly appalling.  I can’t think how they stood it:  I shouldn’t.

I cannot remember exactly when it was that I made a discovery.  Opposite to the library, of which I have already spoken, now a venerable old room, was my bed-room; and there was no other room until you had gone along a passage and crossed a hall.  It was my custom to go to bed very early, and I did so here at Duncan’s, long before the rest of the household.  I suppose they thought I went fair off to sleep, too; for this part of the house was always deserted after I had gone into my room.

It was thus I made the discovery that every night, before retiring herself, Janet came to the library and stayed a few minutes; and I could hear her sometimes moving about books on the table.

For a considerable time I felt hopelessly puzzled.  All at once it struck me—­girls are the same all over the world and in all ages—­that she must come there to look at the photograph of someone she cared for; to say good-night to it; perhaps to murmur a prayer over it.  Girls are made so.  Doubtless she would take it away with her altogether to some place more convenient for such oblations but that Duncan was much in the library, and had lynx-eyes.